Active floor supervision allows supervisors to enhance performance within the distribution center in 3 key ways. Be sure to walk the floor regularly to stay abreast of issues.
By having management show presence on the floor regularly, it helps to identify which employees may require more training and which might be the next to be promoted to a managerial position; it shows you consider the floor and everything which occurs there and the workers to be essential to the overall operation and extremely important; finally, you can address problems as they happen.
Determine the Utilization of Space: To start with, you should determine the cube utilization within you workspace, making sure to check how much empty space is situated near the ceiling. Implementing narrower aisles and higher racks and certain forklifts that work in those types of environments could really increase how you store and transport supplies. What may not seem like a lot of wasted area can mean thousands of square feet and extra dollars with some adjustments.
Check for Obsolete Inventory: If you see a SKU or stock-keeping unit has not moved in over a year, it is definitely consuming valuable space. As well, if you have lots of half-full pallets which are stored or staged in aisles, you are also not using available space to its full potential. By doing an inventory overhaul and re-organizing existing stock, much space can be made to accommodate objects which are moving faster.
How is the Flow of Product? Make the time to trace how exactly product flows in your facility regularly. Check to see if the flow is sequential and logical. Roughly 60 percent of direct labor in the warehouse is allotted to traveling from place to place. You can potentially have less employees completing the same amount of work by being aware of product flow. Being able to move staff to finish different other tasks instead of having personnel doubled up transporting things would get more work out of the same amount of employees.
The order filling process must be reviewed and if it is identified that a variety of SKUs are mixed-up in one location. If orders do not require things of this mix, pickers are wasting time. One more huge time-waster is having the same SKU located in multiple places in the warehouse. Get the staff used of going to a particular place for every particular item so that they are just looking in one area and not traveling all around the warehouse checking more than one place for the same item. These small changes could vastly improve the overall effectiveness in your warehouse.